This paper summarises the management and procedural issues that led to the successful development of AERMOD and CALPUFF and how they will come to be approved regulatory models by the U.S. EPA in the next few months. The legal requirements for constantly updating models is contained in the 1977 Clean Air Act that requires U.S. EPA to publish a 'Modeling Guideline' and to hold a hearing every three years on that Guideline. In 1991, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) formed a committee with the U.S. EPA in an effort to improve models. From the effort, AERMOD was developed along with its meteorological preprocessor. The history of this technical project will provide insight to others who embark on similar efforts in Europe or other countries.

The U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for 1-hour SO2, 1-hour NO2, and 24-hour PM2.5 use a very particular format. It is very important for all modelers (both within and outside of the U.S.) to understand how AERMOD handles this. In particular, U.S. users need to be familiar with the special tools available to help them analyze these results, and non-U.S. modelers (or anyone using AERMOD for a purpose other than the U.S. NAAQS standards) need to know how to disable AERMOD’s U.S. NAAQS-specifi...

Humans can be exposed to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) either directly through inhalation or indirectly through ingestion or dermal contact, which can result in acute or chronic health effects. The risk of exposure varies depending on a number of variables, including the meteorological conditions, local geographical and emissions characteristics, the age of the individuals being exposed, and the exposure duration and frequency. To evaluate and quantify the potential health impacts that may result from specific...

The BREEZE Remote Modeling System (BRMS) is a Web-enabled application that executes AERMOD model runs in a fraction of the time they take on a desktop computer, thereby assisting modelers in reducing model runtimes on large or highly time-sensitive AERMOD model runs. The BRMS operates on a massively parallel computer cluster that combines the processing power of multiple multi-core computers. As such, modelers can minimize model runtimes at a minimal cost using the high-speed parallel processing services offered...

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